The seeds that led to the creation of the Provincetown Players were planted in New York City in 1914 by George "Jig" Cram Cook and his wife, Susan Glaspell. They were both excited by the beginnings of a new type of theatre in America, one that dealt with contemporary issues in a more realistic manner than currently seen in the commercial theatre of the time. They had viewed the possibilities in the newly-created Washington Square Players in New York City and wrote a one-act play, Suppressed Desires, which was turned down by the company for being too "esoteric." The Cooks performed it instead in their Village apartment. Provincetown, which is on the tip of Cape Cod, was a summer gathering place for many artists and writers disillusioned with the cultural norms of the time. While summering in Provincetown in 1915, the Cooks discovered that their friend, Neith Boyce (wife of anarchist Hutchins Hapgood), had also written a play. Also residing there that summer were John Reed, the poet and reporter (some of you may remember him as the central character of the movie Reds); Louise Bryant; Mary Heaton Vorse, an author of novels and a labor organizer, and her husband newspaperman Joe O'Brien; Bror Nordfeldt, a post-Impressionist painter; Wilbur Daniel Steele, a famous short story writer, and his wife Marguerite; sculptor and poet Ida Rauh and husband Max Eastman, who had been teaching philosophy at Columbia but was now the editor of the revolutionary The Masses.
This group of friends decided to perform their plays for their own amusement; Reed's summer guest and former Harvard roomate, Robert Edmond Jones, designed a simple set for them. Their neighbors began to ask to see the plays, so they were eventually performed in a fish-house at the end of a wharf that Joe and Mary (Heaton Vorse) O'Brien had purchased for a studio. Jig wrote another comedy, Change Your Style, and Wilbur Steele had written Contemporaries, and these two plays were also performed together. Without an official name and no initial intention on beginning a theatre, the Cooks and their friends had ended their first season.
That winter Jig Cook dreamed of creating an ideal Platonic community and a collective theatre that unified the arts. Cook's enthusiasm for their newfound venture in Provincetown caused many others Villagers in New York to make a summer pilgrimage to Cape Cod. By the time of their first performances in the summer of 1916, the wharf fish-house was transformed into the Wharf Theatre, but two days before the scheduled opening, it caught on fire, charring the walls and burning their curtain. Even with this set-back, the season opened on time on July 13th to a packed house of ninety people.
The first set of plays were so successfully received that the Players decided to put together another program, but they needed more scripts to consider. One of Glaspell's friends in Provincetown, Terry Carlin, told of his roomate who had a "whole trunkful of plays." The roommate was invited to present a manuscript that evening at the Cook's home. Since he was too shy to read in front of strangers, he stayed in the other room while his play was read by the group that had assembled. The play was titled Bound East for Cardiff and the playwright was a twenty-eight year old Eugene O'Neill.
Susan Glaspell's play Trifles, was also presented for the first time and reception of the Provincetown audiences and the Boston critics inspired Cook and Reed to move the Playhouse to New York that next winter. At a meeting held on September 5, 1916, they decided to call themselves "The Provincetown Players" and, at O'Neill's suggestion, they named their new home in New York "The Playwright's Theatre." The promise of a new and different kind of theatre in New York had finaly begun to be realized.
Jenny Belardi owned a group of row houses on MacDougal Street, just south of Washington Square Park. At 137 MacDougal was the famous gathering spot for "those interested in New Ideas," the Liberal Club, and downstairs in the basement was Polly Holladay's restaurant, which seventy years earlier had been the home of Nathaniel Currier, of Currier and Ives fame. At 135 MacDougal was the Washington Square Bookshop, owned by brothers Charles and Albert Boni. In 1916, Belardi rented out the parlor floor of 139 MacDougal to George Cram Cook and John Reed for the Provincetown Players to make their New York debut on November 3rd in what they now named "The Playwright's Theatre."
Cook and the others created a ten-and-one-half-by-fourteen-foot stage and added wooden benches to seat an audience of about 140. The first production presented was a bill of three one-act plays: Eugene O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff, Louise Bryant's The Game, and Floyd Dell's King Arthur's Socks. Officially, the Players were a "club," with only subscribers allowed to buy tickets to their performances. The twenty-nine performing members of the company adopted a constitution that proclaimed their purpose to be "the production of plays written by its active members, or by others in whose work the active members may be interested." They desired to "encourage the writing of American plays of real artistic, literary, and dramatic...merit." The subscription list began with sixty-four names, but quickly grew to 550.
Their first year was financially profitable, mostly because productions were inexpensive with performers supplying their own costumes, and props borrowed or improvised. Because of growing subscriptions, the number of performances per week was increased. In those first two years, Eugene O'Neill had six new plays presented: Before Breakfast, Fog, The Sniper, 'Ile, The Long Voyage Home, and The Rope. Susan Glaspell had four plays produced: Trifles, The People, Close the Book, and Woman's Honor. Edna St. Vincent Millay, fresh from Vassar and with limited notoriety for her poetry, auditioned as an actress for the company and was cast. A few years later, her role would change to promising young playwright after her Aria Da Capo was produced. The Provincetown's first full-length play was given in April 1918, The Athenian Women, by George Cram Cook. In the audience on opening night was political activist Emma Goldman who brought her friend Mary Eleanor Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald eventually became the managing director of the Provincetown and one of the company's few paid employees.
At the end of the Provincetown's second New York season, subscriptions were up to 635 and the company felt they needed a larger space to operate in. Just three doors down MacDougal Street, and owned by their same landlord, was an old stable that had recently been used as a bottling plant. The Players rented it for $400 a month, putting a scenery shop and dressing rooms in the basement and offices upstairs. Benches that could seat up to 200 were installed facing a "real" stage. To remind themselves that the space was once a stable, a hitching post was left hanging from one of the walls, with the inscription painted above it: "Here Pegasus Was Hitched." A plaster dome cyclorama, a pet project of Cook's, and fashioned after those used by European art theatres of the time, was installed in 1920. This is the theatre, though many times since refurbished, that is known today as the Provincetown Playhouse.
The first performance in the new theatre took place on November 22, 1918, with a bill of one-act plays by Millay, O'Neill, and Florence Kiper Frank. The second bill of the season featured O'Neill's The Moon of the Carribees. Millay's Aria Da Capo was performed the next year. The season of 1920-21 was significant for the production of O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, the first of the Provincetown plays to be a bona fide "hit," and, eventually, the production was moved uptown to the Princess Theatre. Before the move, however, the Provincetown was flooded with ticket requests, bringing the number of subscribers to over 1600. The mostly amateur company with the highest of ideals for American playwrights was now being challenged with the perils of success. New plays were often selected for their potential to transfer to professional theatres and this caused ideological clashes among the company. These differences of opinion deepened and, after their sixth New York season in 1922, a one-year period of inactivity was called for by the members. Cook and Glaspell left to spend at least a year in Greece where, less than two years later, Cook would die.
By 1922, under "Jig" Cook's leadership, the Provincetown could boast of having produced ninety-three new American plays by forty-seven playwrights. James Weldon Johnson claimed that the Provincetown "was the initial and greatest force in opening up the way for the Negro on the dramatic stage." The company had withstood controversy and fought objections to the ideas they felt were most important. Now as they faced the future, an obvious reorganization was deemed necessary and, with it, new leadership. A "triumvirate" leadership was formed between O'Neill, stage designer Robert Edmond Jones, and author and critic Kenneth Macgowan, with Macgowan named as the director of the Playhouse. After months of bitter fighting about the name of this new organization, it was decided to drop the title "The Provincetown Players" and the company was called "The Experimental Theatre, Inc." The playhouse, however, was still known as the Provincetown.
The new season began in November 1923 with a production of The Spook Sonata by Strindberg, followed by a very successful revival of Anna Cora Mowatt's comedy Fashion. During the next season (1924-25), three of the group's larger plays, including O'Neill's tragedy Desire Under the Elms, were staged at the Greenwich Village Theatre, which was across the street on Seventh Avenue from Sheridan Square (now the site of the GNC Nutrition store and a Citibank office). The experimental nature of these productions allowed Jones the freedom to try many elements of "new stagecraft." Keeping two theatres running, however, proved to be too much of a challenge, so after only two years at the helm, the triumvirate amicably left to focus their efforts on experimentation at the Greenwich Village Theatre alone.
This led to James Light being named as the new director of a revitalized group of players, still called the Experimental Theatre Company, who continued to work in the Provincetown Playhouse. Though they staged fifteen productions over the next four seasons, including Paul Green's Pulitzer Prize-winning folk drama, In Abraham's Bosom, operas by Gluck and Mozart, and presented new actors such as the young Bette Davis, no great reason remained to keep the company in the Provincetown Playhouse. In an effort to start anew, money was raised so that, by the early fall of 1929, the group relocated to the Garrick Theatre uptown. Unfortunately, the stock market crash on October 29 of that year caused the financial collapse and the company ceased to exist.
Since that time, the Provincetown Playhouse has been the home of many independently produced plays. It was also the home base for the Community Theatre division of the Federal Theatre Project (1936-39), used as a training center to send directors, actors, teachers and designers out to the five boroughs of New York City to create theatre projects. In 1960, the Provincetown was used to produce the long-running double bill of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape and Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, Albee's first play produced in New York City. It continued to be used to premiere plays by playwrights like Lanford Wilson, David Mamet and John Guare. As this historic Playhouse starts another chapter in its life and begins to be used by New York University's theatre departments, the spirit in which it was originally created will continue as a driving force to enable future dramatists, theatre practitioners and teachers to flourish and grow. For it is in this "hallowed ground in the region of Washington Square," in the words of William Archer, "that we must look for the real birthplace of the American drama."
© Jeff Kennedy, 1998.
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